to transpose a song from guitar to ukulele, you match the chords on both. how do you transpose a chord that uses all 6 strings on a guitar. for example: "are you gonna be my girl?" uses (577655). how do you transpose that?

Dino

08-08-2008, 12:59 AM

to transpose a song from guitar to ukulele, you match the chords on both. how do you transpose a chord that uses all 6 strings on a guitar. for example: "are you gonna be my girl?" uses (577655). how do you transpose that?

I don't play guitar but if I'm correct, that chord for your guitar is an Amaj. On uke luckily you only have to use 2 fingers. Is this what you are talking about?

I used this website since I don't play guitar

http://www.chordbook.com/guitarchords.php

salukulady

08-08-2008, 01:14 AM

A C on a guitar is a C on a uke, an F on a guitar is a F on a uke. I don't know what chord 577655 is on a guitar (you'll have to ask a guitar player, because it isn't on the guitar chord chart I own), but most songs will work that way. Not all though. Some songs written in complicated guitar chords have to be changed into another key for uke. And some songs just don't work at all on uke.
http://www.fretplay.com/tabs/j/jet/are_you_gonna_be_my_girl-crd.shtml

Here's Jets version of your song. it's in the key of E. E's are a bitch to finger on uke. You can either change the key or sometimes if a song has an E in it you can substitute the E with an E7 on uke.

To change the song into another key, do this. Write out the key it is in, like this,

E F G A B C D E

Then write out the chord you want to change it to, under it, lets use C

C D E F G A B C

match them up. An E is now a C, an F is now a D, etc.....

If the song has sharps or dim those are applied to the new notes also.

Most of the time this will work, sometimes you have to tweak 'em a little. Just use your ear and if it sounds right, it probably is. Hope this helps.

By the way, that's a great song. Never heard of Jet....I always assumed it was done by INXS.

UkeNinja

08-08-2008, 02:12 AM

to transpose a song from guitar to ukulele, you match the chords on both. how do you transpose a chord that uses all 6 strings on a guitar.
Thin ice for me as a very beginning musician, but it looks like you might be helped by learning some music theory, and how chords are constructed. You need to know what notes are played what strings to determine what chord it is, and the next step is to take the necessary notes for that chord and play them on the uke. Start simple (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(music)), and you find out that you don't need 4 strings for simple chords, but are in fact repeating one of the notes. There is a graphic by hotnanas in one of the threads that shows you were to look for what notes on your uke. Howlin' Hobbit has "cheater" music theory document on his site, and I am finding Fretboard Roadmaps for ukulele to be quite enlightening (this shows how nooby I am). It starts with a simple chord - 3 notes - and then gradually shows what happens when the chord becomes min, 7, dim or whatever.

(there is a thread "how do chords work" on UU, might be useful as well)

redsedge

08-08-2008, 04:02 AM

This is a real cheater's cheat - download a package called sibelius from the net, put in your guitar music and/or tabs - it will provide the tabs for the music or the music notation from the tabs, by the way - then click on the stave of your choice - ukulele is in there. Then the programme puts it all onto four strings for you.

My son got it for me and so far, he's used it for me too. It looks rather complicated but does have a help section. I'm told sibelius is the industry standard, so most of the sheet music you see will have been produced on it (at least here in the uk). Worth the effort if you're into it. You can also put tunes into it and the thing will play them for you, so if you come across some old song books and don't know the tunes, hey presto! Sibelius will play them for you.

It probably does all sorts of wonderful things but so far I can only look at it in a state of amazement and mild alarm.

Howlin Hobbit

08-10-2008, 05:26 AM

To change the song into another key, do this. Write out the key it is in, like this,

E F G A B C D E

Then write out the chord you want to change it to, under it, lets use C

C D E F G A B C

match them up. An E is now a C, an F is now a D, etc.....

If the song has sharps or dim those are applied to the new notes also.

The problem here is that the key of E has four sharps, F, C, G and D. So it actually looks like this:

E F# G# A B C# D# E

Now you can match them up with C. Unless there's some sort of chord in the tune that isn't -- can't remember the word... enharmonic? -- isn't in the scale anyways. Passing chords and such.

The type of chord (dim, 7, whatever) is transfered over but the sharp or flat of the root note isn't. For example, if you have a C# in the song you're transposing from E to C you don't make it an A#, you just make it an A.

The best way for a beginner to learn to transpose is by learning the chromatic scale and then counting half-steps. That's covered in my "Cheater Music Theory" doc so I'm not going to type it out here. It really isn't hard. A tiny bit of memory work and the rest is just counting.